The use of human mesenchymal stem cell (hMSCs)-based therapies is a promising new approach for the treatment of various diseases due to their widespread availability, relative ease to culture and expand in vitro, ability to differentiate into several different cell types, and their limited immunogenicity. Development of effective hMSC-based cellular therapies requires non-destructive assessment of phenotypes that are indicators of expansion and therapeutic potential. One such phenotype is cell proliferation, as the expansion of hMSCs to therapeutic quantities in vitro requires highly proliferative starting cell populations. Since cell proliferation can be reflected in cell morphology, we assessed the ability to use morphological profiling with VisionSort to identify and isolate hMSCs with higher proliferative capacity as an upstream step in the development of hMSC-based cell therapies. We show that using VisionSort, hMSCs with specific proliferative phenotypes can be isolated label-free and used in R&D efforts to optimize the production of cell therapy products.
